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	Workers Vanguard No. 1079	27 November 2015

Missouri and Beyond

Campus Racism Sparks Protests

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

In the wake of the nationwide explosion of outrage against racist cop terror, protests are now sweeping campuses across the country against the pervasive racism faced by the dwindling number of black youth “lucky” enough to have made it into a university. Skyrocketing tuition and the decades-long assault on affirmative action programs, which granted a measure of access to higher education for black youth, have led to a wholesale racist purge at colleges and universities. The few remaining black students are treated like, at best, undeserving outsiders. This message is also delivered by frat rats and other bigots with provocations reminiscent of the KKK, like the effigy of a black body swinging from a noose on the renowned “progressive” campus of UC Berkeley in 2012.

The current protests were sparked by students at the University of Missouri in Columbia, little more than 100 miles from Ferguson, where the police execution of Michael Brown ignited mass demonstrations last year. Protests at “Mizzou” began in September after black student Payton Head, president of the Missouri Students Association, described in a Facebook post how he had been terrorized by racists in a pickup truck screaming the “N” word. Spearheading the protests were a group of black students called Concerned Student 1950, referring to the year when black students were first admitted to the university. The University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe called out the campus cops to disperse demonstrators.

After it was reported that a swastika had been smeared in feces on the wall of a dorm bathroom in late October, a black graduate student began a hunger strike to demand that Wolfe be ousted. Many students, faculty and staff walked out in support, an action that was spurred by graduate student workers who had earlier fought back and won against the university’s attempt to cut off their health insurance. But it was the school’s black football players, supported by their white coach and teammates, who turned the tide with the threat that they would boycott the next home game if Wolfe didn’t resign. Cancellation of the game would have cost the school a million dollars. Wolfe resigned, as did the chancellor of the university.

The Mizzou football team’s threatened boycott underlines the power of the college athletes who generate billions for university administrations as well as major corporations such as broadcasting and video games manufacturers. As we wrote in our Young Spartacus article “College Sports Plantation” (WV No. 1054, 17 October 2014) supporting the fight by college athletes to unionize, strike and collectively bargain for wages, health and other benefits currently denied them: “While students in general have virtually no social power, if college athletes were to withdraw their labor and go on strike, it could have a significant impact.”

Such power all the more lies in the hands of the multiracial working class whose labor produces the wealth that is appropriated in the form of massive profits by the minuscule, and ruthless, capitalist class—the owners of the means of production. The sons and daughters of the working class, white as well as black and Latino, have increasingly been priced out of a college education or are buried under mountains of student debt. Here lies the potential for a class-struggle fight—allying the students with the power of labor—for free, quality, integrated education for all including open admissions, no tuition and a state-paid living stipend for all students. A central obstacle to the power of labor being brought to bear is the misleaders of the unions who are not even defending their own members, much less lifting a finger in defense of the embattled black population.

Given the long history of betrayals by the trade-union bureaucrats, it is not surprising that there is little to no appreciation of the social power of the working class. This has done much to condition a view that the only avenue of struggle is one of pressuring the rulers to act in the interests of those they viciously exploit and oppress. Just as the Black Lives Matter movement has looked to the Feds to rein in the killer cops, the student protesters overwhelmingly appeal to agents of capitalist class rule, e.g., the campus administration, to transform the universities into arenas of racial diversity and inclusion. The idea that the campuses can be transformed into oases of racial equality under capitalism is a pipe dream. Life in the “ivory tower” is but a reflection of the reality of American capitalism, whose entire existence has been rooted in black oppression.

Liberal Nostrums and Racist Reaction

There was, understandably, much celebration when Wolfe resigned, especially given the racist arrogance with which he had dismissed the demands of black students. But replacing the university president will not change the role of the campus administration, whose job is to run the university in the interests of society’s capitalist rulers. Fundamentally, universities under capitalism exist to educate and train administrators, technicians and intellectuals, as well as the next generation of war criminals, union-busting lawyers and murderous spies needed to advance the interests of U.S. imperialism against the working class and dark-skinned people at home and abroad. The affirmative action programs in education, which we defended, were won through the massive civil rights movement protests of the 1960s but were intended to defuse social struggle. These gains, albeit largely token, were granted with the aim of co-opting a thin layer of the black population, the so-called “talented tenth,” some of whom would go on to serve America’s rulers as mayors, police chiefs, military officers, etc.

Wolfe has been replaced, at least temporarily, by Mike Middleton. The retired deputy chancellor and one of the first black law graduates from the university, Middleton was himself involved in the black student protests at Mizzou in 1969. Will that make any real difference? For the past eight years, this country has been ruled by a black president, Barack Obama. His presence in the White House has done nothing to stem the vicious racial oppression of black people. The ghetto poor are little more than targets for the trigger-happy racist cops. Similarly, the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria continue to be maimed and killed by U.S. drones and airstrikes.

For the racist rulers of America, Obama’s election provided a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism. The image of a black man in the highest office of the land provided a thin gloss on murderous capitalist class rule. A black student protester at Yale expressed the disillusion that is now widespread: “It really is hard to believe because we want to believe that we’re a postracial society, but it’s just not true” (New York Times, 11 November). Nor will it ever be true short of a successful proletarian socialist revolution that shatters this entire system of racial oppression and class exploitation. In the absence of any such perspective, the Black Lives Matter movement, like so many other movements before it, is rapidly being sucked into the Democratic Party electoral machine in the interminable 2016 presidential campaign.

Many anti-racist activists have appealed for “speech codes” and “codes of conduct” in an attempt to transform the campuses into so-called “safe spaces.” Such appeals disarm the victims of racist attacks on colleges by fostering illusions in the supposed “neutrality” of the university administration, itself an extension of the capitalist state. Among the demands at Amherst College are that the university president discipline “racially insensitive” students as well as that the campus cops issue a statement of “protection and defense” of the protesters against any retaliation. The notion that the police would protect protesters is a suicidal illusion. Anything that gives the campus administration and its cops greater authority allows them freer rein to crack down on political dissent by leftists, black students and other minorities. It also plays into the hands of right-wingers who, while whining about “free speech,” aim to purge and silence all opposition to the status quo.

For a Class-Struggle Fight for Black Freedom!

Amid the all-sided offensive against black people in this country, it is hardly surprising that any notion of social equality seems a distant prospect. In this context, the limited and symbolic demands of the black students and other minorities are both an understandable reaction to the very real racist bigotry permeating the campuses and an accommodation to it. After a recent visit to the Mizzou campus, a WV sales team reported that few of the students they spoke to looked beyond raising awareness and breaking down racist stereotypes. This perspective reflects the mistaken belief that racial oppression is the result of “bad ideas” that can supposedly be overcome through “sensitivity training.” On the contrary, black oppression is deeply rooted in this country that was built on the backs of black slaves. Today, the majority of the black population remains forcibly segregated at the bottom of society, subject to desperate poverty and police terror, while the rulers wield anti-black racism to divide and weaken the working class.

Unlike liberals and others who seek to sanitize the racist status quo, our purpose as Marxists is to change that reality by fighting to mobilize the power of the multiracial working class behind a series of demands that address the felt needs of the working and oppressed masses, including free, quality, integrated education for all. This requires breaking the grip of the Democratic Party on both the unions and the black population. The working class needs its own party, a revolutionary workers party that champions the cause of all of the oppressed. We seek to win a new generation, both on the campuses and elsewhere, to the perspective of socialist revolution, which will lay the basis for the genuine liberation of black people and the freedom of humanity.